Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 1001 posts

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#321

Post by eesmith »

JohnMakin wrote: post #261

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

> We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

The way to keep kids from eating (yummy) lead-based paint chips was not holding parents accountable to what their kids ate, but banning lead-based paint.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#322

Post by Salgat »

rafaelero wrote: post #314

I have no idea where this idea that Internet is toxic to children is coming from. Is that some type of moral panic? Weren't most of you guys children/adolescents during the 2000's?

Are you saying that social media isn't harmful to children?

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#323

Post by EnderWT »

julianozen wrote: post #235

There is missing a solution. Give our personal devices have the ability to verify our age and identity securely and store on device like they do our fingerprint or face data. Services that need access only verify it cryptographically. So my iPhone can confirm I’m over 21 for my DoorDash app in the same way it stores my biometric data. The challenge here is the adoption of these encryption services and whether compani…

ISO/IEC 18013-5 (Personal identification — ISO-compliant driving licence — Part 5: Mobile driving licence (mDL) application) is a potential solution for this. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/en/#iso:std:iso-iec:18013:-5:ed-1...

It would allow someone with an mDL on their device to present only their age instead of other identifying information.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#324

Post by vinyl7 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #261

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

We live in a technofeudalist society now, we're all at the whims of the tech corps

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#325

Post by rootusrootus »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #316
numbsafari wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents. The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now…

How easy is it for kids to bypass Parental Controls on iOS devices?

Social engineering is the most effective strategy, because iOS screen time controls are so buggy that eventually parents throw up their hands in exasperation and enable broader access than they would otherwise choose.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#326

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #55

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift. If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an eas…

So kids can drive at 16. But can’t get access to an unlocked phone until their 18? Who gets to decide the whitelist? The government?

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#327

Post by arrsingh »

Age Verification is very hard to do without exposing personal information (ask me how I know). I feel it should be solved by a platform company - someone like Apple (assuming we trust apple with our personal information but seems like we already do) - and the platform (ios) should be able to simply provide a boolean response to "is this person over 18" without giving away all the personal information behind the age verification.

Now the issue of which properties can "ask to verify your age" and "apple now knows what you're looking at" is still an unsolved problem, but maybe that solution can be delivered by something like a one time offline token etc.

But again, this is a very hard problem to solve and I would personally like to not have companies verify age etc.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#328

Post by adolph »

JohnMakin wrote: post #261

We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume. In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web. Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect child…

> holding parents accountable for what their children consume

There is a local dive bar down the street. I haven't expressly told my kids that entering and ordering an alcoholic drink is forbidden. In fact, that place has a hamburger stand out front on weekends and I wouldn't discourage my kids from trying it out if they were out exploring. I still expect that the bartender would check their ID before pulling a pint for them.

It takes a village to raise a child. There are no panopticons for sale the next isle over from car seats. We are doing our best with very limited tooling from the client to across the network (of which the tremendously incompetent schools make a mockery with an endless parade of new services and cross dependencies). It will take a whole of society effort to lower risks.

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#329

Post by simoncion »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #196
iamnothere wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although there is some organic support, there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. It’s apparent if you watch the discussions across platforms, there are obvious shared talking points that come in waves. Governments (and a few companies) really want this.

> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing. Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For example, 1. Foreign influence campaigns 2. Domestic influence campaigns 3. Filtering age-appropriate content I’m sure there are many other points with various degree of validity.

> Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless?

In the US, #1 and #2 are invalid and meritless. Wholly and without reservation. One of the huge reasons for the First Amendment is to ensure that people are able to counter lies uttered in the public sphere with truth.

#3 is handled by parental controls that have existed in mainstream OSs for quite some time now. [0][1][2] However, those preexisting parental controls don't justify additional expansion of the power and influence of authoritarians, so here we are.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety>

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-...>

[2] https://support.google.com/android/answer/16766047?hl=en-rw>

Re: The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection

#330

Post by skeptic_ai »

Aurornis wrote: post #268
armchairhacker wrote: post #55

Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account. If that's criminalized (like alcohol), it will happen too often to prosecute (much more frequently than alcohol, which is rarely prosecuted anyways). I don't see a solution that isn't a fundamental culture shift. If there's a fundamental culture shift, there's an eas…

> Age verification is very hard, because parents will give their children their unlocked account, and children will steal their parents' unlocked account More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon. Or they’ll steal their parents’ ID when they’re not looking. Discussions ab…

Probably will limit to one device per person, to save the children, so we won’t share with others.

(So you need to keep all your stuff into one device to be fully tracked easily. And have no control over your device, share your location… )

Post reply on HN